


Leave Them at the Bottom of the Grave They Dug For You

by Cinnamongirl



Category: Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Courier Deacon, Identity Issues, M/M, and if you assume that Deacon is lying when he talks about his background, but that's usually a safe assumption anyway, this could technically be canon as long as you ignore the dates in PAM's terminal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2019-12-25 15:36:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18264269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamongirl/pseuds/Cinnamongirl
Summary: Most synths have fun fake memories. A happy home, a family. Me, I got nothing. And that... well, it does something to you.Sure, there's a theory that Deacon was the Lone Wanderer from Fallout 3, and it's a perfectly fine theory, but what if he was actually the Courier?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In loving memory of Mollymauk Tealeaf (pun intended)
> 
> The title of this story comes from [this tweet by Dread Singles](https://twitter.com/hottestsingles/status/907044026716635138).

His first memory was of waking up. 

Well, technically, his first memory was of being shot in the head by the asshole in the ugly coat. His _second_ memory was a bright, painful flash of light when he opened his eyes, followed immediately by a wave of nausea. He clenched his eyes shut and rolled over on his side to dry-heave a few times.

The nausea eventually passed and he relaxed against whatever he was laying on, moaning and shivering. He felt dizzy even thinking about standing up.

“Oh, you’re awake!” It sounded like an old man’s voice. There were footsteps somewhere in front of him. “How are you feeling?”

“The light hurts,” he said pathetically. 

“It’s common to be sensitive to light, but it should get better after a while. Here, try these.” The man took his hand and pressed something small and metal into it. It was a pair of glasses- sunglasses, probably, given the circumstances. He unfolded them and put them on without sitting up. He very carefully opened his eyes. The throbbing headache was still there, but it wasn’t as bad, and his stomach felt calmer now. He could see a bald guy with a mustache standing next to him.

“Thanks,” he said weakly. “I bet I look like an idiot, wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“Maybe you’ll start a new trend.” The room got even darker as the man switched a lamp off. “I’m Doc Mitchell. You’ve been here for a few days. How much do you remember?”

“Uh, somebody shot me.” That was all he could remember, actually. Everything else was just just… emptiness.

“Well, you got that right. Can you think of anyone who would’ve wanted you dead?”

“No.” He felt even more like an idiot. “I kind of remember what he looked like, but I have no idea what his problem was with me.” For all he knew, he had it coming.

“Hmm.” Doc Mitchell paced around the room a bit before handing him a mirror. 

It took a moment to realize that he was looking at his own face. “What the hell?” 

He didn’t really have a mental image of what he was supposed to look like, but he was pretty damn sure he didn’t look like _that_. There was the Frankenstein’s monster-esque scar going across his bald head, and- “Are my eyebrows red?” He could barely see them above the rims of the sunglasses but the color was unmistakable. “Am I _ginger_?!”

“I had to shave your hair off to work on your head, but it’ll grow back soon enough. Don’t you worry.”

Doc Mitchell distracted him from the dawning realization of how ugly he was by asking him a bunch of awkward questions. The Doc said that he was experiencing retrograde amnesia, which would probably get better on its own, but other than that and the light sensitivity he didn’t appear to have any lasting effects of his injury. It was apparently pretty remarkable, considering that he was lucky to be alive at all.

“I had to throw your clothes out, too much blood on ‘em. This should fit you, though.” The Doc gave him some kind of one-piece blue monstrosity, along with a wrist-mounted device that he recognized as a Pip-Boy, even though he didn’t know if he’d ever seen one before. “There wasn’t any identification in your clothes but I did find this note.” It was a bloodstained piece of paper with something about a platinum chip written on it. “This mean anything to you?”

He shook his head. 

He’d also had a pistol and a handful of hairpins in his pockets. He tried to imagine himself pinning his red hair out of his eyes, but he somehow knew that they could also be used to pick locks. 

He went to the saloon, on Doc Mitchell’s recommendation. Any money that he’d had to his name had apparently been taken from his body, so he needed to find work quickly. The sun was bright and it still made him wince but he could more-or-less handle it as long as he kept the sunglasses on.

As soon as he set foot in the saloon, everyone turned to look at him. He realized what he must look like, with the bright blue Vault suit, his bald head marred by a huge scar, and the sunglasses to top it all off. “Uh, hey everybody. How’s it goin’?” He waved at nobody in particular.

A woman and her dog came to his rescue, in what turned out to be the beginning of his long and illustrious career of doing random errands for people.

He found out that he was a half-decent shot with his pistol, and that he was marginally better with a longer-range rifle. The headaches went away after a few days and the light sensitivity got a little better, but most of his memories never came back. He knew how to play Caravan and how to make really good salsa, and he had a surprisingly broad knowledge of pre-war literature, but he never remembered anything about who he was or how he’d ended up getting shot in the head. There wasn’t anyone in Goodsprings who knew him, so he must have come from somewhere else. He’d probably just been passing through the area when he got shot.

He also found out that he knew exactly how to use a bobby pin and a screwdriver to pick a lock and he couldn’t help but wonder if he'd almost gotten himself killed because he had sticky fingers, or maybe because he’d had a bad habit of entering buildings where he didn’t belong.

 

He managed to earn enough money from the odd jobs to pay for food and ammo and even some normal goddamn clothes, including a cowboy hat that was big enough to hide the scar. His hair did grow back, but it somehow made him look even worse to have bright red hair sticking out in every direction with a large bald area where the Doc had pulled the bullet out and stitched him up. He ended up shaving it all off again and buying a few more hats, just in case.

It actually wasn’t too hard to blend in, as long as he covered his head and wore clothes that were the right level of shabby. It wasn’t even difficult to bullshit his way around gaps in his memory. He might have been fine if Goodsprings wasn’t so small, but the problem was that everybody in town knew that he was the poor lost head-injury victim who couldn’t even remember his own name, and they all gave him this _look_ that made his skin crawl.

 

He put the Vault Suit back on before he got to Primm, figuring that being a former Vaultie would give him a good excuse in case he didn’t remember something that everybody else knew. He looked at his reflection and saw the Vault Suit, the Pip-Boy prominently displayed on his wrist, his ever-present sunglasses, and an old military helmet that he’d found in an abandoned building. The person in the mirror didn’t look like him, but he looked like _somebody_. He decided that he would be John, a Vault Dweller-turned-mercenary who was investigating the untimely death of someone known only as Courier Six. 

In between getting shot at by escaped convicts, he found out that the person who was originally supposed to carry the platinum chip had backed out when they saw his name. He put all of his effort into trying to find a new sheriff for the town and solving all the other problems that he came across- anything to stop himself from thinking about the chip and what it might mean.

He visited the Vikki and Vance Casino after it had re-opened. He played some blackjack, cashed in his chips, and went to the bar. It only seemed fair to give back some of the pile of caps that he’d won. He was on his second drink when a woman approached him. “I’m Tessa,” she said. “This seat taken?”

“It’s all yours. I’m John, by the way.” He stuck out his hand for her to shake. 

She sat down. The bartender hadn’t noticed her yet, but she didn’t seem to care. “Don’t think I’ve seen you here before.” She was probably making small talk before she asked him to help her with something.

“Yeah, I’m just passing through.” He was wearing generic mercenary-looking clothes because the Vault suit was ripped and he hadn’t gotten around to repairing it yet. He was trying to decide what story to tell her when she leaned into his personal space, startling him out of his thoughts.

“Is that why you’re drinking alone? You know, if you bought me a drink, you wouldn’t be alone.”

“Oh. Uh, I don’t-” He realized that he had no idea how to respond to something like this.

She stared him straight in the eye, waiting for an answer. The confidence should have been attractive. She wasn’t unattractive at all, really. She was curvy with short, dark hair, and she even had all of her teeth. He was sure that Tessa was exactly John’s type.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s not you, it’s… I’m…” He tried to figure out a way to say _I have amnesia and I don’t know who I am and I hadn’t thought this far ahead._

“ _Ohhhh_. You should’ve said something before I made a fool of myself!” She grinned at him. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

As he watched Tessa leave, he was sure that he’d handled this the wrong way. She’d probably come to the conclusion that he was, well, a _confirmed bachelor_. He supposed that it was better for her to make assumptions about his sexuality than to know the truth about him, but he knew that John-the-Vaultie wouldn’t have awkwardly stuttered at her. John would have at least flirted with her and bought her a drink or two.

There was nothing left to do in Primm so he traveled onward, followed by a busted-up eyebot and the occasional human that was bored enough to accompany him. He was Jedediah at the Mojave Outpost, Maynard in Novac, and Luis in Boulder City. He ran a cleaning business, or he was a disgraced former politician, or a down-on-his-luck yucca farmer. He wore the sunglasses because he was embarrassed about his tan lines, or to make him better at bluffing in card games, or because someone had once said that they made him look sexy. 

He didn’t remember anything about his past or who he was but he knew that he could read and write better than most people and hold his own in a gunfight. He had a knack for sneaking past people when he didn’t want to be seen or heard, he could pick almost any lock that he came across, and he was able to lie to and manipulate people without even trying. It was an unusual set of skills for a deliveryman, to say the least. The best-case scenario was that he’d been working as a courier because he was trying to get away from whatever he’d been doing before. Judging from the bullet hole in his head, it looked like his past had managed to catch up with him anyway. 

It did occur to him that he could just stop looking. He could find somewhere to start a life and disappear into the crowd, and forget about platinum chips and the person who he’d been before. Still, as much as every new piece of information made him even more uneasy, he couldn’t stop hoping that he would see or hear something that would shake loose the rest of his memories. 


	2. Chapter 2

Cass was with him when he reached Freeside. She was an excellent traveling companion because she cared enough to have his back in a fight, but not enough to try to get involved in his business. She barely even raised an eyebrow when he dragged her along to help with a series of increasingly-difficult favors for the Kings, for which he was rewarded with a lifetime supply of black wigs.

“Uh, Six?” she said, because she could never keep track of which name he was using, “You know you probably could’ve asked for money, right?” 

“Have you seen quality wigs like this anywhere else? I think they have a stockpile from before the war.”

She shrugged. “As long as you’re the one carrying them.”

He was so happy about his new wig collection that they almost walked past the Old Mormon Fort without even noticing. “Hey, wait up, I think I was supposed to talk to somebody in there.”

The fort was apparently some kind of medical clinic that was run by the Followers of the Apocalypse. Most of the people inside the fort were too busy being sick and/or treating the sick to pay them any attention, but he still managed to agree to do some errands for them. Cass laughed at him affectionately as he entered the information into his Pip-Boy. “Maybe I have a drinking problem, but you have a saying-yes-to-everything problem.”

“Hey, I need to get money somewhere. Ammo isn’t cheap, you know.”

He almost left the fort without noticing the tall guy in a faded lab coat. The man was writing in a notebook and muttering something to himself, but what caught his eye was the expensive-looking plasma pistol in a holster on his belt, only partially obscured by his coat. Dr. Tall, Blond, and Handsome wasn’t trying to show it off but he wasn’t doing anything to hide it, either. 

The man glanced up and noticed that he was staring. “If you need help, there’s a doctor in the tent over there.” He pointed at a large tent off to the side. “Well, I’m a doctor too, but I mostly do research.”

“Is that what you’re working on?” He gestured to the notebook.

“These are just some ideas for a project I’m working on. Trying to find a way to make stimpaks out of barrel cactus, so that we don’t have to rely on pre-War materials that are eventually going to run out.” His glasses were smudged and he was chewing on his lip but he didn’t seem to realize that he was doing it.

“That sounds interesting!” He didn’t think that he knew enough about science to understand the details, but the concept was a good idea in and of itself. “Do you have any promising results so far?”

“Honestly, this is probably a waste of time. If it were this easy, people would have already been doing it. I’m enthusiastic about helping people, but _nihil novi sub sole_.”

“Something… under sun?” He didn’t recognize the first two words, but the last two showed up as prefixes in several English words.

“’Nothing new under the sun’. You know Latin?” He looked surprised.

“ _Cogito, ergo sum?_ Uh… _omnia mea mecum porto_...” He tried to reach into the dark pit that was his memory to see if there were any more Latin phrases in there, and _Et tu, Brute?_ came to mind. He had vague, incomplete memories of the play _Julius Caesar_ , which made him think that either he’d read it a long time ago or read it while he was distracted by something else. “Hey, you’re not with the Legion, are you?” He was technically on good terms with them, but he didn’t know how long that would last.

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

The man was looking at him strangely.

“I’m Harris.” He stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Arcade Gannon.” He had a firm grip and long, almost elegant fingers. “What brings you to the Old Mormon Fort?”

“I’ve been trying to find someone who I heard was living on the Strip, but I don’t have the money to get in right now and I thought I’d do some odd jobs around Freeside and see if I can save up enough.”

“There’s always work to be done around here. Julie would be the one to talk to.” Arcade glanced back at his notebook.

He had a sudden impulse to do whatever he had to in order to keep talking to Arcade. “Well, I was hoping to have a big, strong doctor to protect me.”

“Oh! Ah… huh.” Arcade looked him over, clearly not expecting that. “Yes, well, blatant flirtation will get you everywhere. I’m in.”

Cass cleared her throat. “I’ll be at the Atomic Wrangler if you need me.”

 

He spent the rest of the day running errands for Julie, with Arcade tagging along behind him. Even though Arcade claimed to have terrible people skills, he was apparently well-known and well-liked around Freeside. He was curious and thoughtful but not too pretentious, and they had evidently read lot of the same books so it was easy to find things to talk about. 

Arcade was also lying about something, and doing it badly. It was obvious from the way that he got visibly uncomfortable and evasive when he was asked about the plasma pistol, and how he had a sudden, negative reaction to ED-E that he couldn’t explain. Arcade was also one of the first people he’d met who didn’t try to ask him about his own background. He didn’t press him on it, though. It’s not like Arcade was the only one who had secrets.

“Where are you staying?” Arcade asked him when it was getting close to nighttime and they’d run out of jobs to do in the area.

“I’ve been sleeping on a mattress at the School of Impersonation. It’s even less glamorous than it sounds.”

“Do you want to come back to my room at the fort? It’s not much, but-”

“Yes, I definitely do.”

As soon as the door was closed behind them, Arcade had him pushed up against the wall and was kissing him enthusiastically, and when Arcade pressed their bodies together and shoved his tongue into his mouth, he felt like any lingering questions that he’d had about his own sexuality were definitively answered. 

It was _amazing_. He had no memory of ever doing anything like this but his body seemed to know what to do, like the first time he’d fired a gun. He kissed back with everything he had as he let his hands drift down to grab Arcade’s ass.

“Fuck, Harris.” Arcade tangled his hands in his hair and gasped against his face. He started to kiss a path down his neck, but then he stopped. “Uh…”

He realized that his wig had come off in Arcade’s hands. Arcade was staring at the top of his head. “Yeah, guess I should have warned you about that. I can’t stand my natural hair color, so I’ve taken to wearing those instead-”

“What happened to your forehead?”

He shrugged, hoping that it looked casual. “I made the wrong person mad. You know how it is.”

“How are you still alive?” Arcade was openly gaping at him. “Whoever stitched this up for you did a good job, but you shouldn’t be standing here after a head injury like that. At the very least, you should be a brain-dead idiot who doesn’t know his own name.”

He barely stopped himself from flinching. “So, yeah, I can see that this isn’t going to work. Have a good night.” He grabbed his wig on the way out the door. 

“Shit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-” Arcade called after him but he couldn’t hear anything after the door closed behind him.

 

Arcade found him the next morning outside of the Silver Rush. He was wearing his mercenary armor and trying to look intimidating, but in a bored way. Arcade looked very confused. “What are you doing here?”

“They hired me to guard the store!” He nodded to Simon, hoping that Arcade would take the hint and leave.

“Look, I’m really sorry about last night-”

He cut him off before he could say anything embarrassing. “If you aren’t shopping, I need to ask you to move along.”

The hurt look on Arcade’s face made him want to explain everything right there, but he had a cover to maintain and a job to do.

“I’ll come find you when my shift here is over, all right?”

“Sure.” He didn’t look convinced.

“Is that your boyfriend?” Simon asked as Arcade walked away.

“Something like that,” he said, because it was easier than trying to explain that he’d just met Arcade and it felt like he’d known him his entire life, which didn’t actually mean much where he was concerned.

Simon gave him an odd look. “Didn’t take you for the type.”

“Yeah, well, I’m full of surprises.”

He spent the rest of the day feeling raw, almost like someone had opened him up so they could look inside. 

 

As promised, he found Arcade back at the fort as soon as he could.

“What were you doing earlier? Don’t tell me you work for the Van Graffs now?”

“They screwed over a friend of mine and I think they want her dead. I’m trying to get on their good side so that I can find out more information.”

“Uh, I’m not going to ask,” he said, but he looked relieved. “Look, I’m sorry for overreacting last night. The ‘brain-dead idiot’ comment was pretty offensive. Everybody has scars that they don’t like talking about and I should have known better than to pry. I hope that we can still work together, at least.”

He forced himself to smile. “Sure! No harm done, pal.”

“That’s good to hear. Let me know if I can help you with anything, all right?”

He should have declined, but Arcade looked so hopeful and he didn’t want to disappoint him. “Well, I’m pretty sure that the evidence I need to help my friend is in the safe at the Silver Rush, but I haven’t been able to open it without anybody noticing. I was hoping that you could cause a distraction.”

“What do you need me to do?”

 

They decided that he would wait outside while Arcade pretended to shop for upgrades for his plasma pistol, and then sneak in while everyone was distracted. “Just try to draw as much attention to yourself as possible,” he suggested. “Say something embarrassing or- no, act like you’re about to lose it and just start attacking people, but don’t actually say or do anything that would come across as a threat.”

“That sounds like a perfectly safe thing to do.”

“You’ve got me backing you up, remember? And if all else fails, just knock something over.”

 

As he stood outside waiting for a good time to sneak in, he realized that his previous impression that Arcade was a bad liar had actually been an understatement.

“Uh, do you happen to have energy weapon mods? Well, I know you do, because the kids you pay to run around advertising for you say that you do. I’m a fan of plasma pistols, myself, for, uh, no particular reason.” Arcade’s voice was weirdly loud. He couldn’t hear the others as clearly, but it sounded like Gloria was trying to sell him a new beam emitter. She sounded annoyed, which was a good sign.

There was a loud crash from somewhere inside. Deciding that he wouldn’t have a better chance, he flipped a switch on a little silver box that he’d found in Goodsprings. The next moment, he couldn’t see himself. There was maybe an outline if he paid attention, but it was like watching smoke. 

Arcade was nearly yelling. “Oh, uh, whoops. I’m so clumsy that maybe I shouldn’t even be carrying around powerful weapons like this, but I always thought that it was better to be safe than sorry.”

He crept around the room, past the Van Graffs and their guards. He noticed that Arcade had managed to knock the cash register over. The door that led to the safe was on the opposite side of the room and then from there, it was almost impossibly easy. He unlocked the doors, retrieved the papers he’d been looking for, and closed them, all while Arcade apologized and awkwardly tried to ask questions about the weapons for sale.

It occurred to him that if he looked in a mirror, he wouldn’t be able to see his own reflection. He had a sudden thought that it would be wonderful to use Stealth Boys all the time, before he remembered that this was how the Nightkin ended up the way that they were. He left the Silver Rush as quickly as he could.

“You’ve caused enough trouble. I think it’s time for you to leave.” Jean-Baptiste was glaring at Arcade, who glanced outside and saw him standing there, grinning, in exactly the same spot where he’d been a few minutes ago.

“Yes, I should do that. Thank you for your time!”

 

“Did you get it?” Arcade asked, once they’d turned a corner and walked far enough away to make sure that nobody was following them.

“Sure did! Let me show this to Cass and then I owe you a drink.”

“How did you do that, anyway? Were you actually invisible in there? Do you have one of those _hei gui_ suits?”

“I wish I had one of them. It was just a Stealth Boy that I found a while ago. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to use it.”

 

They showed the papers to Cass, who still wanted to just kill everybody but was starting to come around to the idea of finding justice without a lot of bloodshed.

“I have to go to the Mojave Outpost to deliver this to the NCR,” he explained to Arcade. “Would you maybe want to come with me? I could use some backup, and there’ll probably be a lot of interesting plants on the way that might have medical applications.”

“You do know how to make it sound like fun, don’t you?”

 

It was fine. Enjoyable, even. In between fighting off geckos and bandits, they talked about books some more, as well as guns and history and Arcade’s work with the Followers. They actually talked about almost everything except for either of their pasts, and what had happened the first night they met.

 

Ranger Jackson was almost in exactly the same place where he had last seen him. 

“Howdy, Jedediah! Haven’t seen you in a while.”

He winced as Arcade made a confused noise. 

The Ranger continued on, oblivious. “Something else you needed?”

“I think you want to take a look at these papers.” He handed them over, staring straight ahead. Not that Arcade could see where he was looking with his sunglasses on.

“Hmm, yes. This explains a lot of the lost caravans. You can promise Miss Cassidy that McLafferty and the Van Graffs will be brought to justice.”

“She’ll be happy to hear that.” He was relieved for Cass’ sake but it was hard not to worry about the inevitable conversation that he would have with Arcade once they left.

“I’m not sure that I trust the NCR,” is actually what Arcade said.

“What?”

“Don’t get me wrong, they’re better than Mr. House and they’re a hell of a lot better than Caesar, but I don’t think they’re the best solution for the people of New Vegas.”

He turned around to see if anyone from the outpost was listening. “That’s what you’re focused on? Not my name?”

Arcade looked confused by the question. “If my name was Jedediah, I’d probably go by something else, too. Not that ‘Arcade’ is any better, mind you.”

“Good point. So, uh, what _is_ your issue with the NCR?” They seemed all right from what he’d seen so far.

“Some people are comforted by the idea of a military force controlling everything and enforcing order, but the reality is that good intentions don’t mean a lot in the end.”

“Who should be in charge, then? If not the NCR or the Legion?”

“Ideally, New Vegas will be independent someday, but anything would be better than Caesar taking over.”

“All right,” he said, not knowing what to say. 

They walked in silence for a while, with actual tumbleweeds blowing by, as if for dramatic effect. Eventually, Arcade blurted out “So, you and Cass?”

“What?” He almost tripped over his feet.

“Not that it’s any of my business, but I wouldn’t have kissed you if I’d known. Sorry for making things so awkward.”

“No, it’s not-” The truth was on the tip of his tongue, and it felt like the right time to say it, but he couldn’t make himself blurt it out. “Cass and I are just friends,” he finally said.

“There aren’t a lot of people who would go to all this trouble for a friend.”

“I can’t change what happened to her, but- there has to be a third option, other than drinking herself to death because they ruined her life, or killing everyone who wronged her.”

“You’re a good man, Harris.”

There was another silence that threatened to become long and awkward, so he spoke up before it could get any worse. “I almost have enough money to get into the Strip, and James Garrett offered to pay me to find prostitutes for him. Do you want to come along?”

“I don’t even want to begin to unpack that, but sure, why not?”

 

The first assignment was to find a ghoul cowboy. He hadn’t even known where to start, but Arcade introduced him to the woman who had been hanging around the Old Mormon Fort. “Honestly, it’ll be a relief to not see her anymore,” Arcade said. “She kept trying to flirt with Julie.”

Arcade was helpful in finding the next prostitute, too. “I’ve seen Old Ben around. He’s supposedly retired, but he keeps talking about how he misses his old life. I don’t think it would be too difficult to convince him.”

Sure enough, all it took was a little flirting and a promise to help him negotiate with the Garrets and Old Ben was on board. 

Not unsurprisingly, the sexbot turned out to be more difficult to find. Ralph was happy to give him a holotape with a sexbot program on it--he didn’t ask why Ralph knew how to write something like that and Ralph didn’t ask what he needed it for--but they would have to fight their way through an old factory just to find the one Protectron that would work for this.

“Why do I have to track down that one?” he asked. “I’ve run across inactive Protectrons everywhere. Why can’t I just install the program in one of them?”

“There’s, uh, special hardware,” Ralph said. “You’ll see what I mean.” It was hard to tell in the low light but he might have been blushing.

The Protectron looked like all the other ones, at least from the outside. He plugged the holotape into the computer and uploaded the program. “I really hope this works,” he said. “I have no idea where we’d find another sexbot if it doesn’t.” He breathed a sigh of relief when the Protectron started making a whirring noise. 

“Hey, I think it’s working!” Arcade sounded excited.

“GREETINGS. FISTO IS PROGRAMMED TO PLEASE.”

“What?”

The Protectron-- _Fisto_ \--started walking toward him. “I AM PROGRAMMED FOR YOUR PLEASURE. PLEASE ASSUME THE POSITION.”

“What the _fuck_?”

“PLEASE ASSUME THE POSITION.”

“Uh, what position?” He looked over at Arcade, who had his pistol drawn and was looking increasingly worried. “I think we’re supposed to test it, to make sure that it works.”

“I can shoot it. Do you want me to shoot it? Hell, we could probably outrun it. There have to be better ways to make money.”

He looked at Arcade, and then at Fisto, and then back to Arcade. He thought about how he apparently couldn’t even kiss someone without ruining everything. He thought about how he had almost definitely never done anything like this before.

He found a table and bent over it with his ass out. “Hey Fisto, does this work?”

“You can’t be serious,” Arcade said, but Fisto made a whirring noise that sounded affirmative. “You’re going to die. Either you’ll be fucked to death by a robot or you will develop an infection that will kill you slowly and painfully.”

“You have stimpaks and antibiotics, right?” He shoved his pants and his underwear down past his hips. The metal table was cold and covered in dust that had probably been there since before the war.

“Well, yeah, but-” Arcade stared resolutely at his eyes as Fisto approached him. “You know what? Fuck it. I’m not letting you do this alone. Uh, Fisto, can you do both of us?”

“I AM PROGRAMMED FOR YOUR PLEASURE.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Arcade joined him at the table and spread his lab coat over the table before dropping his own pants and bending over.

“You really don’t have to do this.”

“Neither do you, but here we are.”

 

The experience wasn’t at all what he’d expected, and it definitely wasn’t like anything that he remembered. Fisto had— _parts_ —that were obviously made of hard metal, but they were smoother than one would think. It produced its own lube, somehow, and he tried not to think about what it was made of or how old it was. 

Fisto touched him in ways that were strange and uncomfortable and also made his dick very hard. He looked over at Arcade and thought about what it would be like if Arcade was doing this to him instead and then his body tensed up and he came all over the underside of the table.

Arcade made a surprised-sounding noise. His arm moved as he worked himself under the table and finished soon afterward. He slumped over against the table, looking dazed.

Fisto seemed to take this as a sign that its work was done. It moved back, away from them. “AWAITING FURTHER ORDERS” it said. 

“Uh, yeah, could you report to James Garrett at the Atomic Wrangler? He’ll be wanting to meet you.”

“I AM PROGRAMMED FOR YOUR PLEASURE.” Fisto slowly made its way toward the front door of the building.

Arcade was in the process of cleaning himself off with some purified water and what looked like part of an old shirt. He realized that he was still bent over the table with his pants down and he quickly tried to get himself put back together.

“Can we agree that once we leave here, none of this ever happened?” Arcade’s voice sounded strained.

The atmosphere between them was both more awkward and less awkward than it had been before. “Well, if none of this really counts, I should probably tell you that I might have just lost my virginity.” He said it quickly before he could change his mind. “I have no way of knowing.”

“What?!” 

Even with his sunglasses, he couldn’t look Arcade in the eyes. “You know, you were right when you said that I’m a brain-dead idiot who doesn’t know my own name.”

“Sorry, I really shouldn’t have said that.”

“I was shot in the head.” He gestured toward his forehead, and he could tell that Arcade was thinking about the scar. “I don’t remember anything from before it happened.”

“That’s remarkable,” Arcade said. “Is that why you’re doing all of this? To find out who you are?”

“I don’t know who I was,” he said, with emphasis on the word _was_ , “and I don’t know if I care, but I have some unfinished business.”

“That’s admirable. A lot of people would have just given up after something like that.”

“Uh, thanks.” It felt too much like he was being pitied and it made his stomach twist uncomfortably.

“No, really, I want to help you if I can. Whatever you need, just let me know.”

 

***

 

He’d thought that they might start sleeping together, or at least kissing again, after the event with Fisto that they didn’t talk about. Arcade knew everything about him now, or at least as much as he knew about himself, and they’d seen each other mostly-naked. What else was there to get in the way?

“Are you sure that you want your first time with a human to be with me?” Arcade asked. “I’m pretty boring.”

“You’re not boring.”

“Everyone’s boring compared to you.”

He wasn’t sure how to respond to that, and Arcade had a strange look on his face, so he tried to deflect. “You don’t know that it’s my first time. What if I slept around a lot? Hell, I might have been a really expensive prostitute. You’re lucky that I don’t remember how much I should be charging you.”

“It’s not a good idea,” he said, which seemed different from _I’m not interested in you._

Arcade always made vague statements about how they shouldn’t sleep together, but he never actually said no. He noticed that Arcade never said yes, either, so he dropped the subject entirely for a while and they continued with their pattern of esoteric conversations and bad jokes and saving each others’ lives, repeatedly, until one day when they were turning in for the night at Vault 21.

(On the Strip, he’d been going by Virgil and telling people that he was a missionary for the Church of Atom. Arcade was still Arcade Gannon, researcher and occasional doctor for the Followers of the Apocalypse. Nobody seemed to question why they were traveling together.)

Once they were inside the room, Arcade shoved him against the door. The expression on his face was intense but it wasn’t angry.

“This is familiar,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“You’ve been looking at me all night. Even with those damn sunglasses, I can always tell.”

“I always look at you.”

“I know,” he said, and leaned in to kiss him.

It was softer and slower than the first time. Arcade was careful to avoid touching his head. He put his hands on Arcade’s lower back, still not sure what the boundaries were here, and Arcade moaned and moved closer to him. He tilted his head and let himself get lost in the sensations for a while.

They eventually managed to break away from the door long enough to get his shirt and Arcade’s coat off before they collapsed onto the bed, still kissing. Their glasses kept knocking into each other. He struggled to kick his boots off without breaking the kiss. “Are you-” Arcade started to say.

“You’d better not be asking me if I’m sure that I want this, because I don’t know how much clearer I can be.” Lying on his back like this, it was especially obvious that he was very turned on.

“No, it’s just-” Arcade opened his mouth to say something but closed it instead and rolled over on top of him, pinning him against the bed with his long legs. 

It was absolutely the best thing that he could ever remember happening to him. Arcade held him down and kissed him deeply. He could feel that Arcade was hard—at least as hard as he was, if not more—and something warm and electric coursed through his body when their cocks nudged each other through their pants. He ran his hands under Arcade’s shirt to his back, where he could feel the muscles shifting under his skin as he moved. He realized that his own hips were squirming, trying to get more sensation.

There was a brief flash of disappointment when Arcade pulled his face away, before he realized that Arcade was moving to kneel between his legs. He watched Arcade undo his belt. It was almost uncomfortable to be so exposed when Arcade was mostly fully clothed, but he was kind of into it. Arcade’s face was flushed and he’d apparently taken off his glasses at some point. “Is this all right?” he asked.

“Hell yeah.” 

He watched Arcade unzip his pants and pull his dick out. Arcade wasn’t even trying to be seductive about it. His face was screwed up in concentration like he was trying to make sense of the results of one of his projects, which was much sexier than it had any right to be. This didn’t feel familiar, exactly, but he had a sense of what was going to happen and his body seemed to expect it when Arcade bent down to put his mouth on him. 

It was _wet_ \- which, obviously, it was a mouth and it’s not like he’d expected otherwise, but- there was wetness and warmth and Arcade was doing something with his tongue, and there was pressure, and he couldn’t think clearly, and he was trying to keep his hips still because he knew that it was rude to just start fucking someone’s mouth without asking first, and-

He also knew intellectually that it was considered polite to warn one’s partner before finishing in their mouth, but he only had time to gasp and make a choked-sounding noise before he was coming. He could feel his dick pulsing in Arcade’s mouth but it didn’t even faze him- he just swallowed everything without looking put off by it. “I take it you enjoyed that?”

“Huh. Yeah, that was- Yeah. Fuck.” He tried to remember how to form coherent sentences. “Your turn,” he said, groping around for Arcade’s pants.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I really do.” He squeezed Arcade’s erection through his clothes, making him moan softly and jerk into his hand.

“Well, when you put it that way.”

He managed to switch their positions and get Arcade’s pants open with only minor awkwardness, but he realized that he had no idea what to do next.

His skin was pale and dusted with fine, blond hairs. His stomach was soft but his thighs felt surprisingly muscular. He wanted to get all of Arcade’s clothes off so that he could see all of him. Arcade’s cock was longer than his, and slightly thinner, with a faint scar where his foreskin had been removed. He bent down to drag his tongue across the shaft. It tasted like skin, basically. Arcade made a encouraging noise so he licked him again.

He tried to fit as much of Arcade’s cock into his mouth as he could, but he ended up choking on it.

“Are you okay?” Arcade bent up to look at him.

He coughed. “Yeah, sorry.” 

“What are you apologizing for? Just be careful; I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

It was embarrassing to realize along with Arcade that he’d obviously never done this before. He tried again and he had more success this time, but it felt like he was drooling too much and he didn’t know when he was supposed to swallow. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be licking or sucking or trying to do both at the same time, and he had no idea what to do with his teeth. For that matter, he thought he should be doing something with his hands but he didn’t want to make this any more complicated than it already was. Arcade’s hands were both grasping the bedspread, probably trying to avoid his hair again.

It was obviously working at least a little, because Arcade started to flush and squirm his hips and make little moaning noises. He could feel his dick trying to get hard again in response. He tried to remember what Arcade had done to him and copy it but he’d been so distracted by the sensations that he had no idea how to replicate them. He finally ended up propping himself up on one elbow and using the other hand to jerk Arcade off until he came all over his face with a shudder and a strangled-sounding apology.

By the time he’d cleaned himself off, Arcade was already half-asleep. He made an affectionate-sounding noise and wrapped an arm around him before he fell asleep completely.

 

He sucked Arcade’s dick again in an abandoned building after running into some Legion soldiers and barely escaping with their lives, when they were both giddy and breathless and grateful to be alive. He dropped down to kneel on the dirty floor while Arcade scanned the horizon to make sure that nobody was coming for them.

He was fairly sure that he did a better job of it this time. Arcade seemed to be enjoying it more, but that might have just been the adrenaline. 

 

The next time was on a mostly-clean bed at the Followers safehouse. His body seemed to remember what to do as he fucked Arcade, slowly at first and then harder and faster until they were both out of breath and the entire room smelled like sweat and sex for the rest of the evening.

 

***

 

As far as he could tell, Benny Gecko was the only person in New Vegas who had known him before. He thought about all of the questions he could ask, to try to figure out who he’d been and how he ended up working for the Mojave Express and carrying the platinum chip that had started everything. 

Instead, he put a bullet through Benny’s head before he could say anything, letting the last connection to his past die along with him.

 

***

 

He still wasn’t sure what he thought of the Strip. It should have been comforting to be in an environment where almost everything was fake, where everyone else was lying about who they were and what they wanted, but he could still see the corruption underneath all of it. Mr. House had technically brought about peace, but at what cost? He thought about the stories he’d heard from Arcade, about good people in Freeside who turned to drugs because it was the only way to cope with crushing poverty that they couldn’t escape, and then ended up developing an addiction that eventually killed them. The people on the Strip were just next door to them but none of them seemed to care.

 

He introduced himself as Marcel at Nellis Air Force Base. 

Arcade raised an eyebrow at that but he waited until later to say anything. “You know, you could probably contact the Mojave Express to find out what your real name is.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, because it was easier than trying to explain that whatever name he’d used before, it wasn’t _his_.

“Why not choose a new name for yourself? People do that all the time.”

“It’s hard to explain.” He probably could have stopped there and Arcade wouldn’t have pushed it, but he was trying to be more honest these days. “None of them feel right. I keep trying different names but none of them feel like mine.”

Arcade, for his part, was still being dishonest about something. It didn’t come up very often, but there were topics that made him start rambling or evading and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He thought that he should confront him about it, but he remembered that Arcade never brought up the fact that he couldn’t look in a mirror without flinching and he let it go.

 

It was actually kind of anticlimactic when Arcade told him about his history with the Enclave. 

“That’s all it is?” he asked, dumbfounded. “I thought you were going to tell me something much worse.”

Arcade rolled his eyes. “And here I was worried that you were going to be upset with me.”

“You really thought I’d judge you for who you used to be?”

“Yeah, I should’ve thought that through a little more. I guess I just got so used to hiding it that it became a habit.”

He assumed that things between them would be easier once this secret was out in the open and Arcade could talk freely about his past without having to work around it, but some of the awkwardness was still there. He still occasionally caught Arcade looking at him strangely when he thought he wasn’t paying attention, and he kept making this face that was almost like he was about to ask a question but then decided against it.

 

He still wore his sunglasses all the time, even though he didn’t need them as much anymore. He and Arcade traveled around the desert and took turns making up ridiculous, melodramatic stories about what had happened to the dead bodies that they came across. He convinced Arcade to talk dirty to him in Latin during sex, and he barely understood any of it but the effect was pretty hot. 

They allied with the Omertas and the Great Khans and the Brotherhood of Steel and they reunited the Enclave Remnants to fight together one more time. They killed Mr. House but saved President Kimball, thanks to his apparent knack for figuring out the best ways to assassinate someone and then doing the opposite.

They fought Caesar’s armies at Hoover Dam and brought them to their knees, and he managed to convince the NCR to leave without any further bloodshed. When the dust settled after the battle was over, a lot of lives had been lost but New Vegas was free.

 

He dragged Arcade to the Ultra-Luxe (now with 40% less cannibalism!) to celebrate by spending some time in the steam room. There was just something about moist heat that provided a nice contrast to the dry heat outside.

“What do you think you’re going to do next?” Arcade asked. “I can’t see you staying idle for much longer.” He was leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed, wearing only a towel. 

“I was thinking that I could help you at the fort. Maybe you could train me to be your assistant?” He’d been assuming, or at least hoping, that they’d settle down together after it was all over.

Arcade sat up straighter, frowning. “Is that what you _want_ to do?”

“I want to help you.” He was fairly sure that he’d just said that.

“Look, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about- Why did you work with Yes Man to make New Vegas independent? You never really gave a reason.”

“Isn’t that what you said would be best?”

“It’s not- I didn’t mean-” he sighed. “I didn’t want to have this conversation right now, and I definitely didn’t want to have it here, but it’s concerning that you made a major decision like that just to make me happy.”

“Why shouldn’t I trust your judgment?” His chest felt tight inside, like it was getting harder to breathe. He really wished that they had more clothes on.

Arcade was squinting without his glasses but it still looked like he was trying to avoid eye contact. “I get the feeling that you woke up without any memories so you chased after Benny because it was something to do, and then you found me and imprinted on me like a baby duck and you’d probably spend the rest of your life following me if I let you.”

“You think I’m a baby duck?” 

“Shit, no, I’m bad at this. If anything, you’re more like a teenager. Not that that’s much better, but- you’re physically an adult but you don’t have the life experience, so you don't know who you are and you’re insecure about how you look and you think that your first crush is your soulmate.”

His clothes were across the room. He would have to walk past Arcade to get them, and then he would have to get dressed in front of Arcade if he didn’t want to walk around mostly-naked in front of a bunch of cannibals.

Arcade sighed and wrapped his arms around himself, probably self-consciously. “Look, I really like you. I hope that’s obvious by now. You’re smart and talented and you always make me laugh and you have a good heart, but I really think we need to take a step back from-” he waved a hand around vaguely “ _us_ so that you can figure out who you are.”

He thought about trying to get dressed without removing the towel, but he decided on just putting his sunglasses and hat back on and grabbing an armful of clothes.

“Hey, wait, I didn’t mean that you had to leave.”

“I think I do,” he said, and he walked out into the cool air of the pool room. Several heads turned to look at him. He fingered the pistol that he’d managed to smuggle in, in case anybody tried to eat him, but nobody did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the third story I've written where I don't use the POV character's name. Why do I keep doing this? What is wrong with me?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [Grace Kelly by Mika](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LWIyUPuTo4) and [You Tell Me Where by The New Pornographers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLxpaXQmlY0)

He sold almost everything he owned and got hired as a guard for a caravan that was heading east. 

“You don’t have to go,” Arcade said.

He stared at him from behind his sunglasses, not sure what to say.

“Just be careful, okay?” Arcade leaned in, almost like he was going to kiss him goodbye, but he stopped. “Are you going to come back?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good. Uh, good luck out there.”

“Thanks.”

 

He ended up leaving the caravan after two weeks of trying to look the other way while they stole from nearly everyone they passed. It didn’t take long to get another job as a guard, this time for a trader who didn’t look much older than him but claimed to have been in the business longer than he’d been alive. 

They rode together on a cart pulled by a Brahmin as the trader explained some of the tricks that she’d learned over the years. Purified water was heavy and took up a lot of space in the cart, but she assured him that it was always worth picking up if you could get some cheap because it would sell faster than anything else. Ammo was a good bet too, because everyone needed it and it wouldn’t go bad as long as you kept it away from the water. He learned that she made most of her money by purchasing old, nearly useless guns and then repairing them with nothing but scrap metal and what had to be witchcraft, so that she could sell them in the next town for several times what she’d paid.

She could predict the weather with terrifying accuracy. Her accuracy with a rifle was even better. He once watched her stare down a snarling wild dog until it turned and walked the other way with its tail between its legs. 

“Why’d you even hire me?” he asked her. “It seems like you don’t need any help protecting yourself.”

“Well, if I’d said that I was hiring you because I just wanted the company, you might have gotten the wrong idea.”

“Point taken.”

She kissed him on the cheek when they finally parted ways, and he was sure that he’d either been blessed or cursed.

 

He traveled alone, or with whoever he could find that was heading the same direction. At one point, he joined a group of people who were trying to escape justice after pulling off what sounded like a complicated and successful casino heist. He had a different name and a different story for every town, but he never stayed in any place long enough for it to matter.

He didn’t stop until he reached the east coast. He went north after that, through the Capital Wasteland, until he found himself in the Commonwealth.

 

It was an an accident that he found out about synths at all. He was sitting in some shithole of a bar called the Third Rail, listening to the people around him and trying to decide whether or not it would be worth it to try to find work and save up some money before traveling again. The two men at the table next to him had spent a good five minutes complaining about how synths always meant that violence was coming, one way or another, and he couldn’t figure out what they meant from the context.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said, leaning toward them. “What are synths, exactly?” “I’m new here,” he added, when they looked at him incredulously.

“Androids,” one of the men said. “The Institute makes fake humans to do their dirty work.” The man had a nice hat and bad teeth.

“That’s fucked up,” he said, because it seemed like what he was supposed to say. 

“That’s not half of it,” the other one said, leaning into the conversation. He was wearing at least five different shades of green. “Synths look like real people and they almost act like us, but eventually they get caught and somebody shoots them. Or the Institute sends more synths with guns after them. Sometimes the Railroad gets involved and they all shoot at each other and none of them will help you fix the holes they put in your walls.”

“Damn,” he said, trying to look sympathetic, even though the gangs around here seemed to cause at least as much property damage as the synths and the Institute probably did.

The one in green spoke up again. “But other times the Railroad gets a hold of them and erases all of their memories. They’ll just be walking around, not knowing they’re a synth until the Institute finds them again.” He made a sweeping gesture, spilling beer on his olive green pants.

Both of the men were looking at him strangely. They were probably just expecting a reaction but it felt like they could see through him and were just waiting for him to admit that he was also some kind of memory-less abomination. He forced himself to make a face—something like a frown, or maybe more of a grimace.

The man in the hat relaxed, apparently satisfied. “See what I mean? It’s bullshit! We shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

“It sure is,” he said. He finished his drink and waited enough time to not look suspicious before going off to try to find out more information about the Railroad.

He didn’t actually think that he was a synth. Probably not, anyway. Still, he’d never heard of anyone else like him and he had to find out more information.

 

It took about two weeks of wandering around the area that used to be downtown Boston and listening to people and trying to ask the right questions before someone approached him. He heard the footsteps behind him but he didn’t try to run or draw his weapon. Instead, he turned around and saw a woman who looked like she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in several years. “I hear you’ve been asking about the Railroad,” she said.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how someone would go about joining them, would you?”

“Follow me.” She turned around without waiting for a response and he followed her. She led him a few blocks south, into a destroyed office building that was nearly indistinguishable from all of the other destroyed office buildings.

“Nobody knows who you are or where you came from,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. It occurred to him that he’d stayed here longer than anywhere else since New Vegas, but he was still a relative newcomer.

“I’m not from the Institute, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, you’re too obvious for that. You seem to have a knack for blending in and you can be subtle when you want to be, but you’ve clearly been trying to get our attention.”

“I want to join the Railroad. What else do you need to know?”

He had a speech ready for them about why he wanted to dedicate himself to freeing synths. He’d based it on Boone’s “dead wife” story, with a few of his own twists. Instead, the woman looked him straight in the eye and said “I have one question for you, the only question that matters. Would you risk your life for your fellow man, even if that man is a synth?”

“I would,” he said, without hesitation. It almost felt like he was getting married.

“Welcome to the Railroad.” She gave him a thin smile.

“Not ‘welcome aboard?’ Because it’s the Railroad?”

She just rolled her eyes at him.

 

He didn’t have to give them a fake name because they never asked for it. They only wanted a code name. He chose the first thing that popped into his head and ended up changing it a few weeks later when he got tired of it.

His Railroad career started out with delivering packages (not synths, which were apparently also called packages, but literal envelopes and boxes) and passing along information. He learned that the majority of the people in the Railroad were tourists, so called because they mostly dabbled in espionage and synth liberation. Most of the tourists either quit when they realized that life as a freedom fighter was more dangerous and more boring than expected, or they turned out to be Institute spies and were killed. Some people stayed with the Railroad for years but never progressed beyond the informant level, usually because they had families or other obligations that came first. He was good at what he did and he didn’t have a life to tie him down, so it didn’t take long for him to earn their trust and start getting assigned to increasingly difficult and important missions.

He’d catch himself thinking about Arcade and wondering what Arcade would think if he saw him now, risking his life to save people who weren’t really human. He thought about how the Followers of the Apocalypse dedicated themselves to helping addicts, the homeless, poor people, and others who were the most vulnerable, and decided that Arcade might be proud of what he was doing.

 

He probably wasn’t a synth. Almost definitely. He was at least 94% sure that he was just a human who’d had an unfortunate head injury. He tried to subtly ask around to see if there was a way that he could tell for sure, but Maven saw through him right away. “Are you having your existential crisis already? I swear that you guys are getting them earlier and earlier.”

“Uh, what?”

“The thing where you meet enough synths who don’t know that they’re synths and realize that you might not necessarily be human either. There’s no need to be embarrassed, everybody goes through it,” she said, which didn’t make him feel any less embarrassed. “It’s actually not uncommon for memory-wiped synths to show up offering to help, but somebody usually recognizes them and turns them away. Nobody knows who you are, so you’re probably in the clear.”

Besides, if there was a synth component in his brain, Doc Mitchell probably would have noticed it when he was digging the bullet out.

 

He took risks when he could afford to and was over-cautious the rest of the time. He was careful to avoid getting too close to anybody, in or outside of the Railroad, so that he didn’t _imprint_ on them. Within a year, he was a full-blown agent who knew the locations of all of the safehouses and dead drops and was allowed to come and go from the Switchboard at will. 

His first project as an agent was to develop a plan for improved organizational secrecy. He outlined a proposal to divide the Railroad into different cells, where everyone would only be aware of the bare minimum information needed to do their job. He also had suggestions for more secure ways to communicate. To his surprise, the Railroad higher-ups readily agreed that it would be worth it to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for increased security.

He never really made friends. He had allies and contacts and people who he trusted as much as it was possible to trust anyone when you spent all your time trading secrets, but he didn’t have any friends. The East Coast was too serious to really appreciate his sense of humor, anyway. He liked to think of himself as more of a concept than a person- a blank slate that could become anyone as needed, a tool to further a cause. He thought that he almost managed to pull it off.

 

The first facial reconstruction happened after the Institute raided a safehouse where he’d been holed up and at least one Courser managed to get a good look at his face before escaping.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Carrington asked. “You could just stay at HQ from now on. Nobody blames you for what happened.”

“I need to get back out in the field,” he said.

“Very well. Just don’t come crying to me when it hurts to blink and you’re too stubborn to take Med-X. What do you want your new face to look like?”

“Surprise me. Even though I wouldn’t mind if you got rid of the scar on my head while you’re at it.”

The new face still had the same bright red hair when he went too long without shaving, but it didn’t look any more or less like him than the old face did. He chose a new code name to go along with it.

He was forced to get surgery again a few months later, and then again a year after that. It became a running joke among the Railroad but he never told anybody that no matter how many faces he had, he never looked like himself.

 

The attack on the Switchboard happened early in the morning. He’d been on the way back from meeting with a contact when he heard laser fire in the distance. The smell hit him almost immediately afterward- the heavy stench of blood and ozone. He activated a Stealth Boy without thinking about it and crept closer, hoping against hope that there was a huge firefight in some other downtown building. 

His heart broke when he saw the Switchboard and realized that there was a Courser right outside the entrance. Her rifle was aimed inside, to stop people from escaping rather than coming in, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sneak past her. He ran to the side entrance but there were several Gen-2s just inside, and he could hear from the screaming in the hallway that nothing was getting past. He frantically tried to think of some kind of plan to break in and rescue people, or at least save technology or data, but he’d seen enough Institute attacks to know that there wasn’t anything he could do other than run.

When the dust cleared, he was one of the most senior of the handful of Railroad members who were left. They regrouped and set up a new HQ in a church basement. They didn’t really have the resources to build things like turrets and alarms, but the ghouls kind of acted like a security system and Carrington managed to rig up a password-protected front door. It sounded a lot more impressive than it actually was.

“Is the password really just ‘railroad’?” he asked. “That’s not obvious at all.”

“It means that nobody is going to accidentally stumble upon us,” Carrington said, “and the wheel is large and slow to turn. That gives us time to set up an ambush or escape out the back door, if necessary.” He said all of this without looking up from what he was doing, in the same exhausted tone that everyone else was using nowadays.

The Railroad slowly worked on rebuilding. They managed to recruit more people. They rescued synths, as many and as quickly as they could. He found out that the person who’d given the location of the Switchboard to the Institute had been a friend, or at least the closest thing to a friend that he allowed himself to have. A month ago, he would have said that this was someone who he could trust implicitly.

They were all constantly on-edge, almost paranoid. It was clear that they’d only barely survived the attack and wouldn’t be able to survive another one. The HQ staff and the high-level agents constantly argued with each other about security protocol. They were all hyperaware that they couldn’t really afford to trust each other, but also that they had to be able to trust each other if they wanted to live.

He tried to spend as much time as possible out in the field, listening and observing without getting close to anybody. His sense of humor got darker and more offensive and he pushed almost everyone away, usually on purpose but sometimes by accident. 

 

When everything seemed to be worse than it had ever been and he’d nearly lost hope, he met another number.

Ms. 111 stumbled out of the vault wearing a Pip-Boy that looked like his old one, before it had stopped working and he’d given up on trying to repair it. She was trying to shoot bloatflies with a pistol that she obviously didn’t know how to use. 

He thought about approaching her but thought better of it. She was probably in shock, and there was a not-insignificant chance that she would figure out how the pistol worked just in time to shoot the stranger who was trying to talk to her. Besides, she would never survive out here. It was better not to prolong the inevitable.

Instead, he watched from a distance as 111 miraculously stayed alive long enough to get to Concord and endear herself to what was left of the Minutemen. He lost track of her for a while because he was busy running from a deathclaw that was stomping around. He assumed, again, that she was dead, but he found her later at her old neighborhood in Sanctuary, with the Minutemen looking at her like she was their only hope.

111 didn’t know how to build houses or plant crops and she still couldn’t aim worth shit, but her heart was in the right place and she wasn’t afraid to work hard. He could almost understand why the Minutemen idolized her so much as he watched her stumble around and slowly, awkwardly, rebuild a kind of life for herself. 

It occurred to him that he’d woken up in a world that made perfect sense to him without knowing anything about who he was, but her experience had been the opposite.

111 finally gave up on ever being able to hit anything smaller than the broad side of a barn and decided to carry around a flamethrower, plus some grenades for long-range fights. She never seemed to notice that he was following her. She helped the Minutemen expand into a network of settlements that was almost a force to be reckoned with. She made her way to Diamond City and rescued Nick Valentine, immediately endearing herself to the old detective.

By the time 111 barged into the Old North Church with roughly as much subtlety as a gecko on fire, wearing a suit of Power Armor that was more rust than metal, he knew that they needed to recruit her.

“Call me Deacon,” he said, because that was the name that he was going by. There didn’t seem to be any flicker of recognition when she looked at him.

“I want my secret spy name to be Charmer,” she said.

“Really.” He said it with as much skepticism as possible, because he couldn’t rely on his facial expressions behind the sunglasses.

“Hey, I can be charming when I want to be!” The dog at her heels barked happily, as if to corroborate her story.

“Oh, I’m sure you can. Welcome aboard!”

Somewhere behind him, Desdemona groaned.

 

It was kind of nice to follow Charmer around. Her tendency to attract a lot of attention to herself actually worked out pretty well for him, and she turned out to be a fairly decent spy once she got the hang of it. He realized that he hadn’t spent this much time around any one person since Arcade.

He was starting to worry that maybe he was getting too attached to her when she turned to him, in the middle of setting up one of Tom’s MILAs, and looked at him with a very serious expression. 

“Something on your mind, boss?”

She visibly swallowed. “Deacon, I have something that I need to tell you, but I’m worried that it will change how you see me.”

“Uh, yeah?” He had a sudden anxious thought that she was about to confess that she was in love with him, or something equally mortifying.

“I’m, um, sexually attracted to a Miss Nanny.”

“Huh.”

She cringed.

“Sorry, that was _really_ not what I was expecting you to say. It’s not like you’re the only one out there who’s into robots, if that makes you feel any better. Hell, I think I still might have a sexbot program lying around somewhere! I’m pretty sure that it only works on Protectrons, though.”

“No!” She looked genuinely horrified. “I could never force her into anything! I feel guilty enough for objectifying a robot like that when I’m,” she made a vague, totally-not-subtle gesture, “working for our mutual friends.”

“Glory might disagree with me, but I’m pretty sure that Miss Nannies aren’t smart enough to be objectified. You know, because they’re objects. You should be fine.”

“But she _is_ smart enough! She was modified to have advanced cognitive abilities and a personality profile and-” her lower lip trembled “-I think I’m in love with her.”

“Huh,” he said again. “Have you tried asking her? If she's that smart, she’s smart enough to consent.” He had no idea how a human would have sex with a Miss Nanny, but he suspected that Charmer had ideas and he really didn’t want to hear them.

“She’s still a robot. Why would a robot be interested in sex?”

He could not for the life of him figure out what had made her decide to go to him, of all people, for relationship advice. He really hoped that Charmer wouldn’t expect him to hug her. “Well, you have two options. If you don’t say anything to her, nothing will happen and you’ll probably regret it. If you say something, she might reject you and make you feel like shit, or she might tell you that she feels the same way. At least you’ll know.”

“I guess.” She didn’t even try to hug him, and he almost felt insulted.

 

Charmer didn’t bring up her Miss Nanny friend again and he tried not to think too much about it, until one day when Desdemona asked him to leave Glory alone because she was going through a difficult time.

“What’s wrong with Glory?” She was grumpy a lot and it wasn’t unusual for her to get angry, but he’d never known her to be emotionally fragile.

“It’s G5. It was apparently very important for Charmer to transfer a Miss Nanny’s mind into a Gen-3 body.”

“Why?” he asked, even though his mind was already filling in the blanks of what had happened. 

“Hell if I know, but we’re never going to be able to repay her for everything she’s doing with the Institute, and this is the first favor that she’s asked for since the Courser chip.”

A few weeks later, when Charmer introduced him to her girlfriend Curie, who looked exactly like G5 but had her own voice and mannerisms, he pretended to be surprised.

 

He started to tell her about his past, once. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to do it- maybe because he knew everything about her history, or because she was the closest thing to a friend that he’d had since Arcade, or because he felt like somebody should know. He almost told her the actual truth but he changed it at the last minute to be a story about being a synth with a botched memory wipe. The rest of it was true, at least. She gave him this terrible look of pity that had him backtracking and claiming that the whole thing had been a test, and he decided that he should never tell anyone again.

 

Nearly a year after Charmer joined the Railroad, he realized that he was overdue for a new face. He was really busy, though. He decided to wait until things calmed down more.

 

They’d been so terrified of the Institute finding their new HQ that they forgot to worry about the Brotherhood of Steel until they invaded. It was like all of his recurring nightmares about Switchboard were finally coming true again. The difference this time was that Charmer was there, wearing Power Armor that she’d stolen from the Brotherhood themselves, and she helped them turn the attack into a significant loss instead of an annihilation.

Their retaliation was quick and merciless, and it wasn’t long before he stood next to her as they watched the Prydwen burn. The smell of it was horrible and the air was so thick with smoke that it was difficult to breathe. He couldn’t stop thinking about the children and non-combatants who had been on the airship. _Ad victoriam_ , he thought bitterly. Arcade would have been furious with him. 

 

They attacked the Institute next. He didn’t get a chance to look at much of it but he was surprised by how _clean_ it was. He saw pristine white coats everywhere and glimpses of advanced technology that he only barely understood. Arcade would’ve loved it. Actually, he realized, Arcade would have loved it for about ten seconds until he realized how corrupt the entire place was, and then he would have helped them destroy it.

Charmer at least had the decency to evacuate the Institute before blowing it up. It didn’t make it any easier to breathe afterward.

 

He made a memorial shrine for Glory. He and Charmer worked together to bring down the L&L Gang, and then he helped her build a house for herself and Curie and Shaun, with a large open area for their dog to run around. 

 

One day, while he was shaving his head, he looked in the mirror and realized that his face was, well- it wasn’t _his_ , but it felt familiar and it didn’t make his skin crawl to look at it. He thought about how he’d had this face for too long and this name for even longer, but he didn’t especially want to change either of them. He thought about how the Railroad still had a lot of work to do, but it had turned into more of an aid organization and less of an intelligence network and it didn’t really need anyone with his particular skills anymore.

He was tempted to sneak away in the night but he didn’t want everybody to think that he’d been killed or anything. After tying up as many loose ends as he could and saying lots of goodbyes, he started heading west. It felt like it took much longer to go back across the country than it did the first time.

 

He was prepared for Arcade to be dead. Freeside was a dangerous area, after all, and it had been seven years. Or maybe he’d moved far away from New Vegas, and he was traveling all this way for nothing. He even considered the possibility that Arcade was happily married and didn’t remember him at all. 

Instead, Arcade was still at the Old Mormon Fort, in almost exactly the same place where they’d met the first time. His hairline was starting to recede and there was a new scar on his face, but he looked good. He wasn’t wearing a ring. 

He approached Arcade before he could talk himself out of it. “Uh, Doctor?”

Arcade barely even glanced at him. “If you need help, talk to one of the assistants out front.”

“No, I definitely need your help.”

Arcade looked at him carefully. “Do I know you? Your face doesn’t really ring a bell, but your voice sounds familiar.”

“If it helps, we had a threesome with a Protectron. I actually really hope that narrows it down for you.”

“Six? You’re alive?” His expression of absolute surprise was actually kind of funny. “What happened to your face?”

“I had reconstructive surgery. And I go by Deacon now.”

“Don't tell me you found religion?” Somehow, this seemed to surprise Arcade even more than the new face.

“It’s a long story. Can I buy you a drink and explain?”

“This seems like a conversation that I’ll want to be sober for.”

“A non-alcoholic drink, then. I haven’t had Sunset Sarsaparilla in forever.”

They ended up at a small table in the corner of the Atomic Wrangler. It looked like it had been doing well over the past seven years. The walls were freshly painted, they served hot food now, and he noticed that there were several new prostitutes. The Garrets looked like they had hardly aged at all.

“I still don’t understand where you've been all this time,” Arcade was saying.

“In the Commonwealth, on the East Coast.”

“What were you doing all the way out there?”

“I was a spy, basically. I spent years helping androids escape to freedom but we blew up the factory that made them, so I decided to come back here.”

“You know, I haven’t been exposed to your sense of humor in a long time and I’m sure that I’m out of practice, but none of that made sense.” 

“It’s not a joke. That’s really what I’ve been doing.” His voice sounded rougher than he’d meant it to. This was probably a bad idea.

“Why androids?” Arcade didn’t sound annoyed, just confused.

“They made these synthetic humans, called them synths. They were just the same as us, except that they’d been built in a lab, but they used them as slaves and sent them out to infiltrate so that the ‘real’ humans wouldn’t get hurt if they were caught. I know it all sounds weird, but there wasn’t anyone else who was willing to help them except for the group that I was part of.”

“That sounds very noble, actually.” Arcade stared at him and chewed on his lips. “It’s so surreal to see your face looking like that.”

“Sorry.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just- I never thought I’d see you again.”

“I was worried that you wouldn’t want to see me again, or that you’d forgotten all about me. It’s been a long time.”

“How could I forget someone like you?”

“That’s-” He thought that he should say something appropriately meaningful in return, or deflect with a joke, but he couldn’t think of anything. “Thank you,” he finally said.

There was a long moment where they stared at each other before Arcade tilted his face and leaned in to kiss him.

It felt like his whole body lit up at once and he froze in shock.

“Shit, sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, I don’t know what’s wrong with me-” Arcade was backing away and apologizing but he was too stunned to speak, or even move. He could still almost feel Arcade’s lips against his.

Before he could remember how to talk again, James Garret approached them. “If you two keep that up, you’re going to make the other customers uncomfortable, and they’re paying for a lot more than Sunset Sarsaparillas. Either spend more money out here or get a room.”

“I’ll get a room,” he said. His voice sounded shaky.

 

“You didn’t have to do this,” Arcade said as soon as they were upstairs. “Don’t you have a free room here, anyway?”

“I think that was voided when I changed my face.” 

“Look, I’m not expecting anything. Just because you’re back for a visit, it doesn’t mean that you’re still interested in-” 

He grabbed Arcade and kissed him before he could say anything else. Arcade made a strangled-sounding noise but he just kissed back enthusiastically and pulled them both down onto the bed. He didn’t try to stop this, but he did roll them over so that Arcade was on top.

He’d missed this, even more than he had realized. He thought about telling Arcade that there hadn’t been anyone else while he was gone, that there were people who he found attractive but no one who he _wanted_ like this, that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Arcade even while he was across the country. He thought about confessing to everything, because it seemed like Arcade was still very much interested in him, but Arcade was kissing him and trying to get his pants open and he had no way of knowing whether or not this would just be a one-time thing, and he didn’t want to stop it for anything.

It was fast and messy and perfect. His whole body was over-sensitive and he was badly out of practice but Arcade didn’t seem to care. He couldn’t stop himself from whimpering and grinding his hips against the bed as he sucked Arcade off and then he came with a groan almost as soon as Arcade grabbed his cock.

They lay there afterward, sticky and breathing hard and still partially clothed. “We do need to talk,” Arcade finally said.

“Yeah.” He was in no state to try to argue.

“Your body is still the same, you know. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

“Thanks. I think?”

Arcade laughed softly. “I should have tried to talk to you back then, instead of breaking things off like I did. I was a coward.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Arcade nudged him. “Stop it, I need to say this. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would say to you if I ever had the chance again and I don’t want to waste it." Arcade paused before he spoke again. "I don’t think you ever realized how strange and fascinating you are. You crawled out of a grave with no name and no memories but you somehow managed to bend New Vegas to your will. Some of the most powerful people in the area were begging you to be on their side but the only one you seemed to care about was _me_ , and I could never figure out why.” He sighed. “I should’ve tried to talk to you and work it out instead of just giving up. I regret that.”

He shifted uncomfortably, reveling in what Arcade was saying but with no idea how to process it. He wished that he was wearing more clothes, or at least sunglasses. Why did they keep having difficult conversations without clothes on? He finally said, “You were right when you said that I needed to figure out who I am.”

“So, who are you? Or are you still working on that?”

“I’m Deacon. As far as I’m concerned, the Courier died when Benny shot him. This is my body and my face and I had a good run as a Railroad agent, but I think I’d rather stay here for a while.”

“Deacon, huh?” Arcade felt for his hand and squeezed it, brushing a thumb over the backs of his knuckles. “I could get used to that.”


End file.
